


Unstoppable Force

by avengersincamphalfbloodstardis



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bucky Barnes Has Nightmares, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Literal Sleeping Together, Love, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:34:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22948630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avengersincamphalfbloodstardis/pseuds/avengersincamphalfbloodstardis
Summary: When Bucky wakes up from a nightmare, Sam is there for the aftermath.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 65





	Unstoppable Force

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Faeymouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faeymouse/gifts).



> This is my gift for [Faeymouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faeymouse) for [Sambucky Valentine’s Day Fic Exchange](https://sambuckyficexchange2020.tumblr.com/)! This came to me in the middle of class as I considered your request, and it flowed from there as I wrote as fast as I could to try to get it all down! I really hope you like it<3 Enjoy!

Bucky may have been having the dream, but it is not him who wakes up from it. 

He’s still in there, somewhere, lost in the swimming darkness while the Soldier takes ahold of his body, thrashing as he struggles to move back to the wreckage of his mind and fight back into control. But the light isn’t filtering in properly, and he’s lost to the depths.

When the Soldier wakes up, he’s ready for his instructions, ready to fight on behalf of his handlers. He is trembling with inertia, so close to snapping into action that his nerves are already one step ahead of him. He is the unstoppable force, and there is no immovable object to hold him back.

Something stirs next to him and he tenses, his nerves silencing. Is it his handler? His target?

“Bucky?” the mystery says, the voice swimming to distant ears that can’t quite function there in the dark. “You alright?”

The Soldier wants an order, anything that will keep what’s happening inside his muscles to cease. It’s so much easier to strangle the screaming he hears inside his head when he has an order to focus on, but he can’t move without it.

“Bucky?” the mystery says again, and moves now, into the Soldier’s line of sight. The screaming in his head recognizes the face and cries out.

The mystery, a man with a kind face that will hurt the voice if the Soldier has to make his worried expression twist into one of pain, doesn’t make the mistake of touching him. The Soldier will not let someone without authority touch him—this is an always order.

“Bucky,” he says yet again, and this time, the voice screams so loud it breaks.

The Soldier’s hold is almost broken, though he hangs on by his fingertips, enough that the ragged breath that scrapes his lungs comes from Bucky. The world is still swirling, he can see blood staining his hands and those he hurt to put it there, he can see a skinny boy throwing a punch he won’t land, he can see ballerinas spinning faster and faster and faster.

He can see _Sam_ , too far from him despite sitting right beside him, the warmth of his eyes cutting through the cold of a freezer that Bucky can still feel the chill of.

His hand trembles when he reaches out, he can’t stop it. But when it finds purchase in Sam’s own hand, he’s found his immovable object.

Sam’s arms are warm when Bucky collapses into them, and they envelop him as the sob breaks his chest wide open.

There is still pain in his head where the Soldier is fighting the touch, struggling to find someone to tell him what to do. He fights against this affection, he doesn’t understand it. It doesn’t feel right in the world where the metal of a hand meets the metal of a gun, and any human touch is an animalistic rut for mindless pleasure after a hunt.

Even the Bucky that still tastes the bitter flavor of food without rationed sugar, that still hears a reedy voice yelling _“Pick on someone your own size!”_ before a bully turns back around, that took a deep breath before signing his name onto the army recruitment list, that Bucky doesn’t know this feeling, of safety in another’s embrace. 

But slowly, the voices and flashes of vision and terror bleeds from his scars until he is just the Bucky in Sam’s arms, the one who lived a short life and died, the Soldier who went through hell and came back, the man who was reborn into some strange mixture of all of them. That man is safe shuddering in his lover’s arms, swimming to the surface, back to the world they made together.

It was still dark in this world with Sam, but it was better, not pitch black, but dim and soft. 

Sam’s hand strokes over Bucky’s back in an unplanned pattern, drawing out the uneasy breaths from Bucky’s lungs.

“Sorry,” Bucky murmurs when he is able to speak.

“Don’t be,” Sam tells him, hugging him close. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

Bucky looks off into the room they share together, at the nightlight they chose together, the pictures of their friends, the messy pile of clothes in the corner that make this so much more than any room where Bucky simply existed in. Each belonging is washing away the nightmare concocted of all of the worst parts of his life, looking back at what he used to have. The Soldier had never lived, he’d served, and remembering the Bucky who’d never been touched by war was horrible.

“I don’t even know what it was,” he breathes, sigh heaving through his limbs, draining out of him. “It was just... everything.”

Sam nods, his cheek rubbing against the top of Bucky’s hair. “Yeah.”

Sam has been through this too, Bucky knows. There’s been many nights where their roles are reversed, where Sam wakes up from the cockpit of a fighter plane, watching his friends spiral away from him to the Earth. And when Sam spirals too, right alongside them, an unstoppable force in his descent to the ground, Bucky is his immovable object, catching him.

Which means, when Bucky dreams of a life lost, untouched by the horrors he knows now, filtered through the pain of his time as the Soldier, that Sam understands.

And it is not the reason that Bucky loves him, but it is the reason that he can break down so completely, into the very basic essence of himself, and trust that he will rebuild.

“I love you,” he says softly, because he does, he loves Sam so much. It takes him over more than any Hydra brainwashing ever could, because it is good and pure, and deserves to live in his body.

“I love you too,” Sam replies, his voice like liquid gold in Bucky’s ears. 

Bucky holds him, and lets himself be held, his body surrendering it’s relentless energy in favor of Sam’s unyielding embrace.

And when they sleep, it is not always with utter restfulness, but they are always met by the other when they wake.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments and kudos make me very happy<3 Come say hi to me on [tumblr](https://avengersincamphalfbloodstardis.tumblr.com/)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sleep at Last](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23223520) by [AvengersNewB](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvengersNewB/pseuds/AvengersNewB)




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